Company type | Private |
---|---|
Founded | 2005 |
Founder | Jeroen Wijering |
Headquarters | New York City, New York |
Website | jwplayer |
JW Player is a New York based company that has developed a video player software of the same name.[1] The player, for embedding videos onto web pages, is used by news, video hosting companies, and for self-hosted web videos. The company has also created the video management software "JW Platform", formerly known as "Bits On The Run".[2]
JW Player was developed in 2005, initially as an open-source project.[2] In December 2015, JW Player stated that their software is no longer offered with an open-source license; instead it is offered with a Creative Commons license for non-commercial use.[3][4] The software is named after the founder and initial developer Jeroen Wijering.[5] It initially was distributed via Wijering's blog. In about 2007 it was integrated into the advertising company named LongTail, which was renamed after the software in 2013. In 2008 a company, headquartered in New York, was formed which continued to develop and distribute the player.[6]
During the early development, before it was purchased by Google, YouTube videos were streamed by JW Player.[7][8] In 2015 JW Player was rewritten to reduce size and load time. Version 7 was licensed under the proprietary Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. It had integrated support for HTML5 Video and Flash Video,[9] allowing video to be watched on phones, tablets and computers. That year the company's paying customer base grew by more than 40 percent to 15,000, 60% from the USA. 2.5 million websites used the free edition, playing about a billion videos per month.[9][10]
In 2016, the company released a new simpler-to-use version of its product, entitled JW Showcase.[8] JW Player continues to be used by many companies, including ESPN,[7] Electronic Arts, and AT&T.
JW Player is proprietary software. There is a basic free of cost version distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States (CC BY-NC-SA)[11] license in which videos are displayed with an overlaid company watermark, and a commercial 'software as a service' version.
JW Player supports MPEG-DASH (only in paid version), Digital rights management (DRM) (in collaboration with Vualto), interactive advertisement, and customization of the interface through Cascading Style Sheets.[9]